Bloody Mary Read Online Free Page B

for them to dance. Minstrels in matching costumes began to play, and the six couples paced out the intricate pattern of steps they had been learning for weeks. They had not finished their dance, though, when from the crowd seated on the scaffolding dozens of people suddenly rushed to the pageant and began tearing off the gold and silver ornaments. (On the previous day the forest pageant had been brought into the great hall after the joust, where the king’s own guardsmen and gentlemen of the court had torn it to shreds, carrying off every scrap of valuable cloth and every carefully made tree and shrub. Two of the men set to guard it had had their heads broken, and the others were driven off by force. Nothing but the bare timber, the revels master wrote, was left for the king’s use.) The Lord Steward and head officers of the hall now ran into the crowd and called loudly for the guard, but fearing a brawl if they tried to use force, they stood back as the pleasure garden was stripped to the boards.
    Henry, who had gone on dancing during the interruption, finished hismeasure and then, overlooking the turmoil at the far end of the room, invited the noblewomen and ambassadors among the onlookers to take the golden letters off his costume and keep them as gifts. But “the common people perceiving,” a chronicler wrote, “ran to the king and stripped him into his hose and doublet, and all his companions in like wise.” One of the dancers, Thomas Knevet, tried to escape the plunderers by climbing up onto a stage, but they climbed after him and he too “lost his apparel.” Not until the crowd began despoiling the ladies did Henry call in his guard. Their abrupt appearance startled the crowd, which was pushed back far enough to let Henry and Katherine and her ladies get away through a side door.
    Upstairs, in Henry’s chamber, a midnight supper was ordered for all the survivors of the rout. Henry, more amused than angry at what had happened, “turned all these hurts to laughing and game,” and told his companions to consider all they had lost as largesse, bestowed on the spectators as a mark of honor. Apparently he was convincing, for the supper was an unusually merry one, and the two days of celebration ended in “mirth and gladness.”
    There was gladness too among the “rude people” who managed to bring away the golden spangles and other ornaments. With a few exceptions, they were found to be of fine gold, made from the bullion in the royal treasury; Henry had ordered the gold bars to be melted down for the use of the revels master. Many of the adornments were of great value. A sailor who managed to take several of the golden letters from the dancers’ coats sold them afterward to a goldsmith for nearly four pounds—an enormous sum at a time when master mariners earned three pounds a year.
    The sailor, the guardsmen and grooms, the Londoners and the courtiers would long remember the tourney for Prince Henry, and the king who had been champion, dancer, playactor and, in the end, helpless victim of the greedy crowd who adored him. But the object of the celebrations, the infant prince, they would soon forget. Despite the care of his nurses and rockers at Richmond Palace, he grew sickly. Eight days after the tourney ended he died.
    Katherine, who had been away from her baby for weeks, was inconsolable. Her child was dead, and with him her renewed hope of motherhood. Henry, bewildered and grief-stricken, wept and swore and bellowed at his servants. His grandiose plans for the boy’s future and his own were thwarted. He consoled his wife and then stalked off to tide out his frustrations on the tilting ground.

II
    Whoso that wyll hymselff applye
    To passe the tyme of youth joly,
    Avaunce hym to the companye
    Of lusty bloddys and chevalry.
    Two years after the death of the New Year’s boy Henry VIII crossed the Channel and, at the head of a large army, rode to war against the French. He had long since ceased to mourn the